Aesthetic: As Science of Expression and General Linguistic

Benedetto Croce is one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. His work in aesthetics and historiography has been controversial, but enduring. When the first edition of Aesthetic appeared in 1902, Croce was seen as foremost in reasserting an idealistic philosophy, which, despite its source in continental idealists from Descartes to Hegel, offers a system that attempts to account for the emergence of scientific systems. Croce thus combines scientific and metaphysical thought into a dynamic aesthetic.Croce regards aesthetics not merely as a branch of philosophy, but as a fundamental human activity. It is inseparable from historical, psychological, political, economic, and moral considerations, no less than a unique frame of artistic reference. Aesthetic is composed of two parts: Part One concentrates on aesthetic theory and practice. Among the topics it covers are: intuition and expression, art and philosophy, historicism and intellectualism, and beauty in nature and in art. Part Two is devoted to the history of aesthetics. Croce analyzes such subjects as: aesthetic ideas in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Giambattista Vico's contribution to aesthetics, the philosophy of language, and aesthetic psychologism.In his new introduction to a classic translation, John McCormick reviews Croce's impact in the fields of aesthetic theory and historiography. He notes that the republication of this work is an overdue appreciation of a singular effort to resolve the classic question of the philosophy of art: art for its own sake or art as a social enterprise. Both find a place in Croce's system.

Dall'interno del libro

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Pagina xiv He seems not to have been aware of the first American study of aesthetics,
George Santayana's The Sense of Beauty (1898). Having gone so far out on the
philosophical limb, Croce is of course peculiarly vulnerable to his critics' saws.

Pagina 97 - Beauty in this physical reproduction of 'expression'. He says : 'Monuments of Art the stimulents of aesthetic reproduction are called beautiful things or physical Beauty. This combination of words constitutes a verbal paradox, for the beautiful is not a physical fact; it does not belong to things, but to the activity of man to spiritual energy'.

Pagina 21 - ... a melting furnace formless pieces of bronze and choicest statuettes. Those choicest statuettes must be melted just like the pieces of bronze, before there can be a new statue. The old expressions must descend again to the level of impressions, in order to be synthesized in a new single expression. By elaborating his impressions, man frees himself from them.

Pagina 206 - The mind, without looking any further, rests satisfied with the agreeableness of the picture and the gaiety of the fancy. And it is a kind of affront to go about to examine it, by the severe rules of truth and good reason; whereby it appears that it consists in something that is not perfectly conformable to them.

Pagina 18 - ... to the world of feeling, and so forth, arise from the failure to realize exactly the theoretic character of simple intuition. This simple intuition is quite distinct from intellectual knowledge, as it is distinct from perception of the real; and the statements quoted above arise from the belief that only intellectual cognition is knowledge. We have seen that intuition is knowledge, free from concepts and more simple than the so-called perception of the real. Therefore art is knowledge, form;...

Pagina 9 - Every one can experience the internal illumination which follows upon his success in formulating to himself his impressions and feelings, but only so far as he is able to formulate them. Feelings or impressions, then, pass by means of words from the obscure region of the soul into the clarity of the contemplative spirit.

Pagina xi - What I call spirit is only that inner light of actuality or attention which floods all life as men actually live it on earth. It is roughly the same thing as feeling or thought; it might be called consciousness; it might be identified with the pense'e or cogitatio of Descartes and Spinoza.

Pagina 20 - Not in the least: expression always arises directly from impressions. He who conceives a tragedy puts into a crucible a great quantity, so to say, of impressions: expressions themselves, conceived on other occasions, are fused together with the new in a single mass, in the same way as we can cast into a melting furnace formless pieces of bronze and choicest statuettes. Those choicest statuettes must be melted just like the pieces of bronze, before there can be a new statue. The old expressions must...

Pagina 69 - Here, for instance, it may be asked how an ornament can be joined to expression. Externally ? In that case, either it does not assist the expression and mars it ; or it does form part of it and is not an ornament, but a constituent element of the expression, indivisible and indistinguishable in its unity.

Pagina 11 - We may thus add this to the various verbal descriptions of intuition, noted at the beginning: intuitive knowledge is expressive knowledge. Independent and autonomous in respect to intellectual function; indifferent to later empirical discriminations, to reality and to unreality, to formations and apperceptions of space and time, which are also later: intuition or representation is distinguished as form from what is felt and suffered, from the flux or wave of sensation, or from psychic matter; and...